Rituals by Vincent Moon (review)

There is plenty to say about this year’s installment of Club Transmediale (CTM), the Berlin-based annual festival devoted to “adventurous music and art.” The festival pays close attention to (and champions) movements in new and canonical experimental music—particularly underground online, club and dance music scenes. It turns an insightful eye on movements in technology, contemporary culture and politics, and somehow rather successfully avoids simply attending to what is (about to be) in style. This year’s program, under the title New Geographies, included talks, seminars and an exhibition and attended to a range of questions raised by the notion of diversity—whether of race, gender or geography—in contemporary music culture. New Geographies was curated in collaboration with research organization Norient, a group of ethnomusicologists who use online publishing to explore emerging global music scenes.

With this year’s theme of geography, it wasn’t hard to find oneself considering the on-the-ground impacts of living in a globally connected world. Cross-cultural dialogue takes on a new resonance when close to everyone’s mind are the realities of refugee crises, mass migration prompted by climate change, revolution and war and an apparent move toward right-wing politics—all of which seem to forecast an uncertain future economically, physically and psychically. For those not forced to move, economic crashes have in many places cost a generation of young people their international mobility and perhaps their creative freedom at a time when support for young artists and musicians is increasingly corporate-sponsored, if available at all.

With such things at stake, the importance of dialogue with, or at least an increased awareness of, “other” cultures, particularly through such shared spaces as party- or dance-music culture, requires more than ever an intellectually informed honesty and awareness of privilege that treats the originators of these movements and their work as neither exotic nor naïve. The panel discussion “Roots to Routes; How to Research, Document and Mediate Music Today,” moderated by Florian Sievers, with Wendy Hsu, Christopher Kirkley, Sarah Abunama-Elgadi and Thomas Burkhalter, gave an excellent overview of the concerns, approaches and issues faced by artists, ethnomusicologists and label owners regarding their own contributions to this liminal cultural space. As the panel title indicates, a change in awareness regarding diasporic music scenes, as well as the local global music scenes, means that, at least among more discerning audiences, the idea of a homogeneous “world music” as a genre in itself no longer makes sense, given the range and dynamism of the forms of new music being “discovered” and popularized (apparently at ever-increasing speed). World music, as a category defined by what it is not—“Western”—suggests a “them and us” binary that cannot and should not be maintained; it overlooks the deep cross-pollination among musical styles (and legitimizes theft); and it naïvely assumes that the producers of “world music” are themselves unaware of their own place in the global marketplace. The CTM exhibition at Bethaniel in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg featured video and interview documentation from numerous local music scenes that in recent years have been increasingly accessible online through reissues and new releases on Western record labels such as Soundway [1]. These local music scenes offer interesting materials for researchers interested in the interplay between tradition, culture and technology, and a theme that recurs at CTM is the often-surprising variety of ways in which communication technologies are used by individual scenes and artists to produce and distribute music. The ongoing proliferation of information networks and tools, the Web, mobile computing, cheap information storage and services such as WhatsApp allows artists and their publics to distribute music files and contribute to the visibility of some musical cultures that would otherwise remain unknown to a wider public.

Also incorporating an ethnographic imperative was Vincent Moon’s Rituals, the three-screen video installation at HAU 2 that showed specially edited selections from Moon...